ejstubbs

I'm sure I read in the extended discussion in the Cally Sleeper here that they switch one coach from Aberdeen to Fort William in the summer. (More tourists needed to feed the midgies I expect.)

Explanation from the horse's mouth linked from post #660 of this very thread.

They did explain it properly (if a bit quickly, blink-and-you'd-miss-it-style) in episode 2. I didn't notice the "lazy shorthand" being repeated in episode 3 - but then I missed the first ten minutes or so (what happened with the viaduct, did it get washed away when the river rose or was it all OK?) and it may be part of the same introductory sequence they use for every episode. The trestle bridge was impressive - but again I wasn't convinced by Mr Spooner's contribution. His argument that Silver Lady couldn't negotiate a right-angle seemed a bit dubious. Didn't they put turntables in on one of the other difficult sections (albeit he and Dick went along later and 'engineered' at least half of them out)? And the segment about crossing the truss bridge over Laggan Locks clearly showed the loco negotiating a pretty damn tight 90° bend. Given they only have to get the loco through once (and given some of the shenanigans they've resorted to elsewhere along the route - cough, the train ferry, cough - picking her up and turning her by hand would appear to be within their own rules!) I can only conclude that either Hadrian was being needlessly fussy, or 'someone' decided that they needed to extend the scope of the job part way through in order to inject a bit of drama into a job that was going all too smoothly. These volunteer navvies sometimes seem to be altogether too competent! (Old engineering adage: the trouble with doing something right the first time is that nobody appreciates how difficult it was.) Yes, I'm interested to see how they coped with that, especially since the track will presumably have had to have been left on site for a few days while the train caught up. I will admit that I am finding the 'story' a bit confusing to follow - perhaps because the progress of the loco is so far behind the track laying and engineering. The truss bridge was shown being constructed in episode 1, and they only to drive the loco over it in episode 3. It's entirely unclear to me whether they were able to spend the intervening time finessing the design and construction, or if it had been sitting around in its as-originally-built state for N days until the driving team turned up. Judging by the teaser at the end of episode 3 I assume we'll get to see the funicular in episode 4, when the track was being laid for it in episode 2. It seems a bit disjointed; but maybe that's just me. (I'd have been inclined to structure it around the progress of the loco, showing each tracklaying and engineering 'challenge' as a single flashback sequence when the loco approached the section in question. It is, after all, the slow progress of the loco, not the track, that's putting the successful completion of the 'challenge' in jeopardy.) I did enjoy seeing the party at the campsite - good to get some insight in to what the "navvies" got up to once they've ditched the hi-viz! I agree that Cameron seems to be becoming a low-key star in the driving team. (I have to say that driving in shifts doesn't actually sound too arduous to me, despite Dick's dramatic 'revelation' at the meeting. It basically seems to consist of walking rather slowly and taking a break every 20 minutes or so! Then again, maybe that's just me: I've done 12+ hour continuous walks in the Highlands a number of times so maybe I'm just used to it.) I also agree with those who observed before that some of the interviews with the navvies seemed a bit intrusive. OK, they probably agreed to do it but I still found it uncomfortable the way they kept the camera focused and running as the lassie choked up talking about her memories of her ex-commando granddad, for example. They could at least have allowed her to "take a moment" before going on. Overall, though, it's not too demanding Sunday evening viewing and I'll probably tune in for the last two episodes to pass the time if nothing else.

Had to have a play with this myself to understand what you meant but I think I've got it now: the round-ended thingummy pivots around the bolt & washer, so with a fulcrum somewhere along metal rod the linear motion of the slider can be turned in to a sort-of rotary motion. Would need some experimentation to find out whether it could be used for eg a level crossing gate. UPDATE: According to this German online shop, there are now two new point motors from MTB: MP6 and MP7. It seems that they are triggered by a pulse, like a solenoid point motor, but I struggle to make out any more details since the technical information is presented in jpg format which Google Translate won't translate. I can't see anything on MTB's own web site about them.

Thank you for that helpful answer; makes a nice change from snidey ridicule. (It's often said in other threads on RMWeb that there's no such thing as a stupid question. Apparently some would seem to disagree.) Sorry to appear dim, can you clarify this for me? Are you saying: that if the loco was operating off the national network then it wouldn't have to be compliant with current regulations (ignoring for a moment the fact that the Valenta would be allowed anyway under grandfather rights), or the fact that it's been preserved makes no difference to the regulations it must comply with.

If it was acquired for preservation with the Valenta installed then that would seem reasonable. But if they want to deliberately re-engine it back to a non-compliant configuration - is there a rule that effectively says "preservation doesn't count"?

Would that be permitted, given that (AIUI) one of the reasons the operational units needed to be re-engined was so that they would meet modern emissions regs? (Alternative approach: install a decent sound system and play a recording of the Valenta scream every time it pulls away! Hey, if it's good enough for BMW...)

I think that photo might be a bit misleading. At first sight the silver bit looks as if it's the whole of the doorway, and it does indeed look narrow. In fact, though, the door is partially open, so the actual doorway is wider then the visible bit of the door. I'm not saying that it is actually wide enough for a wheelchair, though. Maybe wheelchair access will be through the guard's compartment in the power cars?

The discussion about the track from James May's two programmes made me think: could they have bought new quad bikes, and sold them on afterwards? Or does Glasto empty the showrooms as well as the rental warehouses? (I recollect seeing a fair few emporia full of new quad bikes from my peregrinations around the Highlands - where "a fair few" is a relative term, taking into account the overall sparseness of retail provision in that part of the world.)

And retention tanks? Or am I behind the times with the waste discharge issue?

Actually, of course, they standardised on Kadees. That's the problem with standardisation: if you're not careful, the standard you thought everyone else had standardised on turns out to be a different standard to the standard you've standardised on. Even with spelling.

It's explained on their web site: http://www.barb.co.uk/about-us/how-we-do-what-we-do/

Er, hang on a minute: I think it has been previously established on this thread that people are entitled to watch it and post their opinions on it. They are not necessarily entitled to have their opinions respected, but to effectively just tell them to shut up and go away is going a bit far. People are equally at liberty not to read the thread if it causes them upset or discomfort. AFAIK this isn't a "safe space": we're supposed to be grown-ups who can deal with dissenting opinions. Aren't we? With that said, herewith my thoughts about episode 2: There seems to be a bit of revisionism going on. Mr Strawbridge seemed to claim that he'd told the team working around the bridges to build a derrick. From what I remember of last week's programme, his original suggestion was to run the track down the pontoon and on to the boat that way. CAVEAT: we will likely never know what was cut out in the edit suite. There seem to be a fair few disjoints and frayed ends in the narrative as it is being presented to us so it may be that the fault lies in post-production. Overall, though, I found the whole farrago around the 'ferry' annoying. Was it really that badly planned? If I were adjudicating an attempt on the record for the "longest model railway in the world", I would be inclined to rule out the stretch up as far as when they managed to retrieve the engine from the drink, simply because of the amount of manual intervention they had to resort to. (I'll gloss over the apparently innumerable derailments when the thing was actually running on the track.) I was disappointed that we got to see so little of the track laying through Fort Augustus (Jenny's team IIRC). I'd have thought there was just as much scope for problems to arise and need solving in that environment as out in the wilds. Maybe not ones that could be addressed with power tools and plywood - but then I reckon that would have provided a bit of useful variety. I'm also disappointed that we've not seen much, if anything, of what went on away from the railway. Someone referred to "living like the navvies did", and one team leader mentioned that his team had had little sleep. Some footage of the camp site and what went on there would have helped to provide a bit more illumination to those remarks. There seems to be an underlying problem with communication between the teams doing the work and the 'leadership' team. If the management have to request re-work because the job hasn't been done to standard (eg the missing expansion joints) is that down to not communicating the requirement properly in the first place, or the team ignoring it? Or is someone assuming that someone else will 'just know' how to do it? (And we all know what happens when we assume, don't we children?) The fact that Dick and Hadrian felt the need to take it upon themselves to sort out the issues created by the surveying of the steep section looked to me like another example of the requirement not being clearly explained at the outset. As an engineer who now has a management role, I would regard it as a failure on my part if I ended up having to do the actual work! The poor management of the quad bikes looks like another instance of inadequate planning, and/or an assumption that "people will know what to do". I was not impressed with the interaction between Mr Strawbridge and the team leader who had doubts about what he was being asked to achieve. Cajoling and sweet-talking someone in to agreeing that it will be OK (and them falling for it, there's fault on both sides) is all too often a recipe for it not going OK at all, in my experience. Worst case, people's reluctant agreement is later used to place the blame on them for the goal not being met; I've seen people succumb to stress and depression in such circumstances. More constructive is to have an adult conversation about the concerns, discuss remedies and mitigations, and proceed on a basis of mutual agreement. It's the senior party whose most at fault in such situations IMO, simply because of where the power & authority lie. I'm afraid Mr Spooner still doesn't endear himself to me. His snitty comments about the hi-viz and buoyancy aids seemed to be aimed at the team leader when more than likely that instruction came from the production team. If he wants to have a rant about elf'n'safety (not that someone carrying as much excess weight as he seems to be is in much of a position to talk authoritatively about health) I'd suggest he needs to find a different platform. Again, though, it's all in the edit. He may be a big cuddly teddy bear in real life, but he comes across in the programme as a bit of bully IMHO. He seemingly couldn't resist a sarky comment behind the back of the departing team leader who had (quite rightly, IMO) stood up to him and prioritised his team members' welfare. Plus points: They did row back a bit on the "Victorians couldn't do it" story, sort-of explaining that Inverness ended up being connected to the railway network by another route, so the need for a route through the Great Glen pretty much went away. Silver Lady is the real star of the show for me. Her electrics even survived being dunked in the lock! Kudos to David Soul sorry, Roudhouse. Conclusion: I find that I'm watching this programme much more from an organisational and management perspective than with any real interest in the railway side of things. In that respect maybe it is more like The Apprentice (which I can't stand) - but without the members of the Great British Public participating having been deliberately picked from the useless, delusional t*ss*rs pile. From what I've seen so far, in this programme most of the incompetence and poor performance has been on the side of the management rather than the 'performing monkeys'. Bottom line, though, is that I'm watching the programme on my PVR, but it's not being archived to my "might want to watch it again" backup disc.

Peco still do a re-railer, part number SL-37.

Thanks, I had seen that thread* but I hadn't noticed before that Silver Sidelines pointed out on that thread the difference between the Scot and Jub driving wheel balance weights. Can't take the risk of people pointing and laughing** so I've gone for a Hornby rebuilt Scot to provide the new chassis. The twelve wheel pickup should be a handy bonus. * You actually linked to the poster's profile page, not the thread - but I found the thread from their topics list: http://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/topic/129464-Bachmann-royal-scot/ ** Well, my missus is the only other person likely to see it and she wouldn't be aware of the difference. But I would know!

Thanks for pointing this out. I managed to record it and have just got around to watching it now. Disappointed that Naga Munchetty introduced it by repeating the assertion that it was "a challenge that had defeated the greatest engineers of the Victorian era." Redeemed somewhat by Claire explaining later on that it was the politics between the railway companies that stopped it happening, not a lack of engineering capability.

The other thing about older motor vehicles - which is again related to the emissions issue - is that it won't be long before they won't be allowed in certain, particularly urban areas, or will be subject to a charge for doing so. The Scottish Government wants low emission zones (LEZs) to start going in to place by the end of this year. According to their consultation document, neither my 25-year-old motorbike nor my 7-year-old car would be allowed in at all. (This is one reason why I am seriously considering changing my car this year - though not the only one.)

The last refurbished iMac I bought turned out to be "not as described" when it arrived. I bought it as a 2.9GHz quad core. Powered the thing on and discovered that the chiselling Irish b*st*ards had tried to fob me off with a 3.1GHz 8-core... The one before that I suspected of homicide - or computercide - for a short time. My aging G3 iMac (the "lampshade" model) was on its last legs so I bought a refurbed 21" Intel core duo iMac to take over the bulk of the work. It turned up, I powered it on, all looked fine. I ran the migration tool that copies all your data, user accounts, config settings etc from an old machine to a new and few hours later I was logged on to the new iMac and it was whirring away like a champ. It was only a bit later that I discovered that the old one was stone dead. Wouldn't power on, nothing. Local Apple fixer declared it uneconomic to repair. Checking the price of the necessary parts online myself I had to agree. I gave it away for parts to a chap whose own G3 was sick. Sad to see the faithful old thing go: it was as if it had hung on to life just long enough to hand my data over to the "next man up". (Wipes away a tear...)

Sorry, thought I might have had a copy but I was mistaken. They seem to have a placeholder for it, or something like it, on the new site here: http://service.Bachmann.co.uk/past-products/ Whether that ever gets filled is another matter. Call me skeptical, but I've seen far too many web sites that worked perfectly well, albeit with a slightly antiquated look'n'feel, get replaced with an incomplete but "still in progress" whizzy new version which somehow never gets properly populated and sorely lacks some of the very useful functions. features or information that the old one used to have. The downloadable service sheets page is obviously incomplete - several current models aren't listed. Whether they will get round to putting service sheets for defunct models (or at least ones that they haven't made for a fair wee while, like the parallel boiler scot) on the new site remains to be seen. I'm glad that I managed to grab the ones for models I own before the web site was mucked about with. Another option might the Internet Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/sitemap/Bachmann.co.uk. They seem to have a copy of http://Bachmann.co.uk/pdfs/branchline_products_by_item_no.pdf from 2011 (which I think is when the list was last updated - AFAIK they didn't keep it religiously up-to-date) but I can't work out how to download it (it doesn't help that the Wayback Machine search engine appears to be borked just now). UPDATE: Got it! Online, anyway: https://web.archive.org/web/20171112221118/http://www.Bachmann.co.uk/pdfs/branchline_products_by_item_no_rev11.pdf - still trying to work out how to download the pdf. UPDATE AGAIN: D'oh! I just needed to right click, open it in Preview and save it from there. Copy about to be PMed to you.

As has been noted on other threads (in particular, the one on the Hornby Duchess) the dyes in old colour film stock can degrade, or just change over time, so old photos aren't completely reliable as a guide to colour shades, even for something as apparently straightforward as black vs dark grey. The caption to the photo you reference describes the wagons as: "two Locomotive Department coal hoppers in overall grey livery". Whether that's based on the author's knowledge of the colour they were supposed to be, or just a judgement from the photo itself, is not stated. The Hall shunting the wagons also looks "overall grey" in the photo which, although the loco is obviously filthy, might suggest that the colour rendition in the photo can't be completely relied upon. (The wagons look more or less pristine in comparison to the loco, though, going by the clarity of the lettering.)

They wouldn't pass modern emissions regulations for a start. You can still buy one as a "classic" and maintain it yourself if you want to. That's the main reason why, although tempted a number of times, I've not replaced my 1995 VFR within a newer bike. It's a big boy's toy, not my primary mode of transport. I couldn't justify paying someone else to diagnose & fix a modern bike. This one, if it breaks, (a) I can do it myself, (b) it can wait until I have the time to do it, and (c ) I quite enjoy doing it.

Picking up on the discussion which started as a result of Bachmann announcing that their new version of the parallel boiler Royal Scot has been put on the back burner for now, I'm wondering which option would be preferable for replacing the old split chassis under one of the existing models. Models which seem to be fairly obvious potential sources of a replacement, non-split chassis are the Hornby rebuilt Scot, or the modern, non-spilt chassis Bachmann Jubilee. The Hornby model has the potential benefit of pickups on the tender wheels as well as the driving wheels. I've read that it's a simple job to fit the Hornby chassis to the Bachmann parallel boiler body. I've also read that the Hornby tender is a bit poor, though I'd guess that if your Bachmann Scot has the Stanier tender (as mine does) then it should be fairly straightforward to fit the Bachmann tender body to the Hornby tender chassis. Whether that would be better or worse I don't know. I also don't know how easy it is to fit the non-split Bachmann Jubilee chassis to the Scot body. Is it a straight swap, or is some surgery required? I also don't know whether the Jubilee driving wheels would fit under the Scot body - I know they should be the same diameter, but are they in the same place? (I'm struggling to find the necessary info online.) A third potential donor model might be the non-split-chassis Bachmann Patriot, which I would hazard a guess is the same as the Jubilee, or as near as makes no odds. I'd be interested to hear from anyone who has successfully upgraded their Bachmann Scot in any of the above ways - or other ways I haven't thought of - and how easy or otherwise they found the process to be.

Is that "tomorrow" as in the morning after your post in the small hours of Friday, or really tomorrow ie Saturday? I ask because I'm watching it on my computer now and haven't seen anything yet, so I was wondering whether I had the wrong day!

I'm pretty sure that was mentioned. (But I've deleted the recording now, and I refuse to trawl back through it on 4OD to check!)

The original line-up when Lemmy formed the band in 1975 had Larry Wallis on guitar and Lucas Fox on drums. Taylor replaced Fox later the same year, then Clarke replaced Wallis in 1976. Sad to think that none of those three are with us any more. I saw them at Derby Assembly Rooms after Overkill came out. Mind-blowing show but OMG they were loud!!!*...my ears were still ringing the next day! Would have suited the character in this clip, though. (And that's another decent entertainer we lost too early.) * Which, to be fair, was a good part of the reason I went to see them.